The Strongest Woman in the World

September 22, 2026
novel | pb | 220 pgs.
5.5" x 8.5" 
978-1-960385-56-7

She has the strength to move the world—but chooses to hold it still.

Siblings Eiður and Gunnhildur grow up in a household balanced uneasily between emotional volatility and unspoken grief—a home where their parents are never happy at the same time. When tragedy fractures the family, the siblings are separated, their lives diverging in unexpected and quietly extraordinary ways.

Eiður turns to activism, seeking order and justice in a world that rarely offers either. Traveling to Lesbos to lead a group of rebel activists aiding the refugee crisis, he fears that he lacks the passion and empathy necessary to enact true social change. Gunnhildur, who hides a physical strength most would find unimaginable, becomes a funereal beautician, renowned for her ability to lend peace and dignity to the dead. In her meticulous care for the bodies of others, she finds a way to hold the world still, if only briefly. 

These two threads—Gunnhildur's superhero-like strength and Eiður's activism—come together at a jail, where Gunnhildur attempts to prove that she really is the strongest woman in the world.

Translated from the Icelandic by Larissa Kyzer

• 

About the Author:

Steinunn G. Helgadóttir (b.1952) is a visual artist and well-known Icelandic poet and prose writer. She received The Icelandic Women’s Literature Prize 2016 for her novel Voices From the Radio Operator’s House. Helgadóttir’s work has been exhibited at solo and group art exhibitions around the world. She has also curated numerous art exhibitions in several museums and galleries in Iceland.

About the Translator:

Larissa Kyzer is a writer and Icelandic-English literary translator. Her translation work has earned her the American-Scandinavian Foundation’s Nadia Christensen Translation Prize, the Icelandic Bookseller Association’s Incentive Award, and a Pushcart nomination. She has also received support from the NEA, the European Union Prize for Literature, Fulbright, the American-Scandinavian Foundation, the Icelandic Literature Center, Reykjavík UNESCO City of Literature, and Finland’s Kone Foundation. Larissa is on the steering committee of the National Writers Union's Literary Translators Division, a member of the Icelandic Writers Union, and on the board of the American Literary Translators Association. She splits her time between Brooklyn and Reykjavík.

•

Praise for The Strongest Woman in the World:

“Rare are the authors who shed a new light on their home country, for the benefit of readers. Those authors are yet more rare who can formulate something that readers have always known about their society, and yet, have never been able to pinpoint it. Steinunn G. Helgadóttir is such an author.”—Kari Tulinius

“Not a single superfluous word—destiny and glimpses of existence are flying by, and the reader is compelled to go along from the first page onward.”—Gudrun Urfalino Kristinsdottir

“To be a person and survive, that is magic, as clearly demonstrated in this story about the world’s strongest woman . . .”—Hlin Agnarsdottir